Akira Kurosowa: How Rashomon Was Made

Rashomon (Directed by Akira Kurosawa)

A woman is  brutally assaulted and her samurai husband is slain in a jungle by a bandit. The woman and her attacker give contradictory narratives of what transpired in court, while the deceased man, talking through a medium, offers another version. Finally, a woodcutter who claims to have observed the attack provides a fourth version. However, whose account is to be believed? Rashomon, which won both the Venice Grand Prix and the Academy Award for best foreign language picture, is not only an example of the great Kurosawa at his peak – collaborating with his constant partner, the imposing Toshiro Mifune – but also of cinematic storytelling at its most audacious. Rashomon has had a profound influence on film structure and terminology in the 60 years since it was released, with its various contradictory flashbacks conspiring to show truth as an amorphous entity. 

However, the film's visual eloquence and remarkable cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa, which employs the dense woodland environment as a metaphor for the story's tangled emotions, should not be overlooked. "[The] peculiar impulses of the human heart will be represented through an intricately crafted dance of light and shadow," Kurosawa wrote of his preparations for the film, which he adapted in part from Ryunosuke Akutagawa's short tale Yabu no Naka (In a Grove). "In the film, characters who become lost in the maze of their own hearts venture into a larger wilderness..." Kurosawa's effort to reconnect with the art form's roots, which he feared were in risk of being obscured resulted in the bristling brilliance of the film. "I believed that since the arrival of talkies in the 1930s, we had misplaced and lost what was so magnificent about the old silent films," he explained. I was acutely conscious of the aesthetic loss as a source of ongoing annoyance. I felt compelled to return to film's origins in order to rediscover this unusual beauty..." The final devotion to truth and idealism may be a little too soothing. However, this is readily mitigated by Rashomon's meticulous psychological examination of its audience — probably Kurosawa's greatest work.

In the following extract from his autobiography, Akira Kurosawa discusses the making of Rashomon.

When I had finished Scandal for the Shochiku studios, Daiei asked if I wouldn’t direct one more film for them. As I cast about for what to film, I suddenly remembered a script based on the short story ‘Yabu no naka’ (‘In a Grove’) by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. It had been written by Hashimoto Shinobu, who had been studying under director Itami Mansaku. It was a very well-written piece, but not long enough to make into a feature film. This Hashimoto had visited my home, and I talked with him for hours. He seemed to have substance, and I took a liking to him. He later wrote the screenplays for Ikiru (1952) and Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954) with me. The script I remembered was his Akutagawa adaptation called ‘Male-Female.’

Probably my subconscious told me it was not right to have put that script aside; probably I was—without being aware of it – wondering all the while if I couldn’t do something with it. At that moment the memory of it jumped out of one of those creases in my brain and told me to give it a chance. At the same time I recalled that ‘In a Grove’ is made up of three stories, and realized that if I added one more, the whole would be just the right length for a feature film. Then I remembered the Akutagawa story ‘Rashomon.’ Like ‘In a Grove,’ it was set in the Heian period (794-1184). The film Rashomon took shape in my mind.

Since the advent of the talkies in the 1930’s, I felt, we had mis­placed and forgotten what was so wonderful about the old silent movies. I was aware of the esthetic loss as a constant irritation. I sensed a need to go back to the origins of the motion picture to find this peculiar beauty again; I had to go back into the past.

In particular, I believed that there was something to be learned from the spirit of the French avant-garde films of the 1920s. Yet in Japan at this time we had no film library. I had to forage for old films, and try to remember the structure of those I had seen as a boy, rumi­nating over the esthetics that had made them special.

Rashomon would be my testing ground, the place where I could apply the ideas and wishes growing out of my silent-film research. To provide the symbolic background atmosphere, I decided to use the Akutagawa ‘In a Grove’ story, which goes into the depths of the human heart as if with a surgeon’s scalpel, laying bare its dark com­plexities and bizarre twists. These strange impulses of the human heart would be expressed through the use of an elaborately fashioned play of light and shadow. In the film, people going astray in the thicket of their hearts would wander into a wider wilderness, so I moved the setting to a large forest. I selected the virgin forest of the mountains surrounding Nara, and the forest belonging to the Komyoji temple outside Kyoto.

There were only eight characters, but the story was both complex and deep. The script was done as straightforwardly and briefly as possible, so I felt I should be able to create a rich and expansive visual image in turning it into a film. Fortunately, I had as cinematographer a man I had long wanted to work with, Miyagawa Kazuo; I had Hayasaka to compose the music and Matsuyama as art director. The cast was Mifune Toshiro, Mori Masayuki, Kyo Machiko, Shimura Takashi, Chiaki Minoru, Ueda Kichijiro, Kato Daisuke and Honma Fumiko; all were actors whose temperaments I knew, and I could not have wished for a better line-up. Moreover, the story was supposed to take place in summer, and we had, ready to hand, the scintillating midsummer heat of Kyoto and Nara. With all these conditions so neatly met, I could ask nothing more. All that was left was to begin the film.

However, one day just before the shooting was to start, the three assistant directors came to see me at the inn where I was staying. I wondered what the problem could be. It turned out that they found the script baffling and wanted me to explain it to them. ‘Please read it again more carefully,’ I told them. ‘If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible.’ But they wouldn’t leave. ‘We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don’t understand it at all; that’s why we want you to explain it to us.’ For their persis­tence I gave them this simple explanation:

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings – the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going be­yond the grave – even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.

After I finished, two of the three assistant directors nodded and said they would try reading the script again. They got up to leave, but the third, who was the chief, remained unconvinced. He left with an angry look on his face. (As it turned out, this chief assistant director and I never did get along. I still regret that in the end I had to ask for his resignation. But, aside from this, the work went well)…

There is no end to my recollections of Rashomon. If I tried to write about all of them, I’d never finish, so I’d like to end with one incident that left an indelible impression on me. It has to do with the music.

As I was writing the script, I heard the rhythms of a bolero in my head over the episode of the woman’s side of the story. I asked Hayasaka to write a bolero kind of music for the scene. When we came to the dubbing of that scene, Hayasaka sat down next to me and said, ‘I’ll try it with the music.’ In his face I saw uneasiness and anticipa­tion. My own nervousness and expectancy gave me a painful sensation in my chest. The screen lit up with the beginning of the scene, and the strains of the bolero music softly counted out the rhythm. As the scene progressed, the music rose, but the image and the sound failed to coincide and seemed to be at odds with each other. ‘Damn it,’ I thought. The multiplication of sound and image that I had calculated in my head had failed, it seemed. It was enough to make me break out in a cold sweat.

We kept going. The bolero music rose yet again, and suddenly picture and sound fell into perfect unison. The mood created was positively eerie. I felt an icy chill run down my spine, and unwittingly I turned to Hayasaka. He was looking at me. His face was pale, and I saw that he was shuddering with the same eerie emotion I felt. From that point on, sound and image proceeded with incredible speed to surpass even the calculations I had made in my head. The effect was strange and overwhelming.

And that is how Rashomon was made.

– Excerpted from Something Like an Autobiography, trans., Audie E. Bock. Translation Copyright ©1982 by Vintage Books.

Jonathan Demme: Story Teller

The Silence of the Lambs (Directed by Jonathan Demme)

Jonathan Demme came to mainstream prominence as a director with his adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs in 1990. Based on Thomas Harris’s novel about a female FBI agent’s hunt for a serial killer under the guidance of the psychopathic Hannibal Lector, the film was a huge success thanks in part to the memorable performance of Anthony Hopkins and garnered five Oscars, including one for Demme. The darkness and bleak humour of the film however is in stark contrast to the brightness and spirited tone of his other work.

Demme was born in 1944 in Baldwin, New York.  Exposed by his parents in his early years to foreign films, Demme dropped out of school and worked as a film reviewer which brought him to the attention of the producer Joseph H. Levine. Demme worked tor Levine as a film publicist, and had a sideline as an occasional music writer until a fortunate encounter with producer/director Roger Corman, led him to writing and producing two biker movies with Joe Viola. Demme’s first attempt at directing, the female prison drama Caged Heat (1974), exhibited aspects that would become central to his work; humour, a solidarity with the underdog, a strongly feminist slant, and a love of pop music.

Demme moved into independent films with Handle with Care (1977), renamed Citizens Band, an offbeat comedy that was critically lauded but a box office failure.

Next was a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, Last Embrace (1979), and Melvin and Howard (1980) a fact based drama about Melvin Dummar’s claim to be a beneficiary to Howard Hughes’ estate. As before, critical praise was not matched by commercial success.

Demme’s next film, Swing Shift (1984), a fictionalised account of the women factory workers of World War II, was marred by production problems.  Something Wild (1987), a ‘yuppie nightmare’ movie, Married to the Mob (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs, were more successful and were marked by Demme’s use of strong female leads.

The latter’s huge success now gave Demme considerable influence as a director, and his response was Philadelphia (1993) the first mainstream Hollywood movie to address the AIDS pandemic. Beloved (1998), based on Toni Morrison’s book, tackled slavery, and The Manchurian Candidate (2004) was a new version of the classic 1960s conspiracy thriller. 

Throughout Demme’s career, his film ventures were bisected by work in other genres and fields, most notably documentaries that addressed his political interests – on the struggles in Haiti, Hurricane Katrina, and the legacy of former President Jimmy Carter.

Demme was also a highly influential director of rock concerts most notably with Stop Making Sense featuring Talking Heads; Storefront Hitchcock with Robyn Hitchcock; and Neil Young: Heart of Gold. Latterly he was more involved with television work, directing episodes of The Killing and Shots Fired, his final credits as a director.

An intense, gritty, crime odyssey in which an FBI cadet tracks down a serial killer with the help of another incarcerated and manipulative serial killer, The Silence of the Lambs was director Jonathan Demme’s masterwork in suspense, full of unsettling close-ups and disconcerting dialogue. Due to its mix of impressive performances and a sense of claustrophobic dread, it became a modern classic.

In the following extract from an interview with Film Comment magazine, Jonathan Demme discusses his approach to Ted Tally’s screenplay adaptation.

FILM COMMENT: Aside from the fact that it’s a good story with good characters, what was it in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ that really resonated in you?

JONATHAN DEMME: Ever since my days of working with Roger Corman, and perhaps before that, I’ve been a sucker for a woman’s picture. A film with a woman protagonist at the forefront. A woman in jeopardy. A woman on a mission. These are themes that have tremendous appeal to me as a moviegoer and also as a director.

You weren’t drawn to the serial-killer aspect?

No, I was repelled by the idea of doing a film about a serial killer. Quite apart from do you want to make a film of it, do you want to see a film of it? [Then] I started reading the book, when Orion sent it to me, and I leapt at the chance to get involved with characters of such dimension, and a story with so many complicated and interesting themes.

Why is it that you are drawn to women’s stories?

It has to do with the fact that just in everyday life, in this male-dominated society, women are operating under some handicaps. For women to achieve what they want is harder than for men to achieve what they want. That brings a touch of the underdog to them, and I respond to that. So I’m partial to women in that sense. I think they’re better people, by and large.

Also, the male characters in ‘Melvin and Howard’, ‘Something Wild’, and ‘Married to the Mob’ are not men’s men in their masculinity — there’s a sensitivity to them, a more feminine side in some way.

Well now, Gavin, I don’t want to come across as some kind of sissy in this interview! But I’m pleased you feel that way. Because from what I understand on the subject, we’ve got our female hormones and our male hormones regardless of which sex we happen to be. If I have a female side to me, I value it for the reasons I said before. And I like it when men feel free to not show that they’re the toughest guy around. I find a lot of fault with aggressively tough guys. On every level, globally, personally, this is the sort of attitude that gets us into trouble. I don’t think I’ve particularly done anything with the characters as written, to sort of take them away from a 100-percent maleness. But I may be more drawn to men who are willing to show their vulnerability.

Did you see ‘Silence’ as having a kind of subversive potential?

No. I need to find good scripts that I have regard for in order to do what I do. And apart from constantly searching for a script that would work in the race-relations arena, I don’t really seek out particular kinds of scripts. Something Wild I thought was a wonderful screenplay. I liked its originality. I liked very much that E. Max Frye was able to start us out thinking that we’re seeing one kind of story, and then gradually take us into a much darker kind of story. If there were certain themes about the dark side of America lurking beneath the surface, terrific. But it’s not like a deep-seated vision that exists already within me, and now ‘Something Wild’ comes along and gives me an opportunity to express that. I just respond to writers’ work.

My whole process is really, come to think of it, a series of responses. First, I respond to a writer’s work, and then the next big thing is responding to the work of the actors. And finally, in the cutting room, I’m responding to the footage we’ve wound up with.

I did like that The Silence of the Lambs was a woman’s picture. Is that vaguely subversive? – I don’t know. I haven’t talked to Tom Harris about this, and ultimately I don’t think this is of special interest to moviegoers, but I love that he’s taking some really good pokes at patriarchy while spinning this tale. And I think the movie sort of manages to do that, too.

Some people say directing doesn’t require the creativity or imagination of acting or writing. You talk about responding to things instead of, say, ‘the director’s vision.’

The director doesn’t have to take the creative responsibility of dreaming up what all the actors and crew should be doing. When you start out you think you have to. If you’re working on tight budgets and fast schedules, you think you have to know everything, because if you don’t then how’s it all going to get done in time? But the better the people you work with, the more you realize you can relax and perceive and enjoy and respond.

How did you arrive at your portrayal of Dr. Lecter? There’s almost an abstract quality to him, and you place him in very stylized, gothic settings – not quite real.

More than anything, I was trying to be utterly loyal to the spirit of Lecter as I understood it from the books [Red Dragon – filmed as Manhunter in 1986 – and The Silence of the Lambs] and the script. You read them and you just get a certain kind of feeling about Lecter which stands apart, I think, from all other characters in all other works of fiction. And now he’s got to be on screen. And luckily, it’s going to be Anthony Hopkins bringing him to life. Anthony really knew exactly what to do there. He got this joke.

Kristi Zea – the production designer – and I spent a tremendous amount of time trying to deal with the bars on Lecter’s cage. We were never happy with the different looks we were experimenting with. And finally we went to glass. The looks of Lecter’s environments are sort of one step beyond, one step into active imagination in the presence of a lot of ultrarealism elsewhere in the picture.

Were we on some level trying to make it easier for the audience to deal with Lecter? One of the big challenges for this movie was, how do you depict some of the shocking scenes described in the screenplay? Like when the police officers burst into the room in Memphis to discover their fallen partners. Ted wrote, ‘What greets them is a snapshot of hell.’ [Laughs.] Thanks, Ted. But it’s okay, we got that.

It was very hard, because you want to own up to the content of the book and script. But you don’t want to cross the line with people, make people physically ill. You don’t want to compromise them to that extent. You want to give them the good old-fashioned kind of shock they paid their money for without mortifying them. I’m not against mortification in films, by the way, as a moviegoer; but in my own films I think I will always stop well short of it.

But, again, the look of Lecter’s cell block was gothic, even medieval – anything but modern and institutional.

I didn’t want people to feel, for a second, they were seeing anything remotely like a prison movie. When Clarice and Lecter square off against each other, one on the inside of the cage, one on the outside, I didn’t want to settle into a someone-visiting-a-prisoner scene. We aspired to creating a setting for these encounters that would not evoke any other films, that would have a freshness and a scariness all their own.

To me, those encounters are staged somewhere between psychoanalysis sessions — given that Lecter is a psychiatrist – and Catholic confessionals.

I thought it was essential that the movie really put the viewer in Clarice’s shoes. That meant shooting a lot of subjective camera in every sequence she was in; you always had to see what Clarice was seeing. So as the scenes between her and Lecter intensify, inevitably we work our way into the subjective positions. And maybe that brings that heightened sense of intimacy we associate with confessionals or with the psychiatrist’s couch.

You had the actors looking as close to the lens – without looking into the lens – as possible. Standard over-the-shoulder shots or matching singles are done with plenty of distance between the eyeline and the lens – but you cut them as close as possible during those scenes.

Well, in most of them, one is looking slightly off – just slightly – and the other one is smack into the lens. We really pushed for that.

Then in the final sequence in Gumb’s basement she can’t see and the subjective shooting shifts to the killer’s POV through his infrared nightvision goggles.

Exactly. I relished that on a technique-of-making-a-movie level: the idea that we’ll be predominantly in the shoes of the protagonist throughout, and then when she’s deprived of her sight, we’ll be in the shoes of the killer. And perhaps that abandonment of Clarice’s point of view will make the situation even more distressing on a certain dialectic level.

In that scene I felt he was way too close to her. In the book I visualized him stalking her across the basement, instead of on top of her. You made it more claustrophobic.

The idea that Gumb would try to get as close as he possibly could, and touch her hair and – given that he holds the power, he has the gun – he would play with this proximity: that appealed to me as a way to stage the scene.

Overall, how did you approach the material stylistically? What were you aiming for in terms of the look of the film?

It started off with wanting to have a film that was rich in closeups and subjective camera. One of the reasons I work so consistently with Tak Fujimoto is that Tak comes up with a brand new look for every movie. Which is what gifted DPs are supposed to do. I’ve almost stopped talking to him about lighting going into films, because his conception of a look for a film is inevitably going to be a lot more interesting and appropriate than what I might have dreamed up. Because that’s not really one of my strong points – conceiving the kind of lights and shades of a look for a movie.

My only thing was, I didn’t want the film to look like another modish, stylish, moody broody long-shadow catch-the-killer movie. And because of the incredible heaviness of the subject matter, it was important to aspire to a certain brightness whenever possible. To that end, Tak and I looked at Rosemary’s Baby together a couple of times. A very bright picture most of the time. Tak then spun off from there.

But as a director, how do you make sure you’re all making the same movie? Do you sit down with your key people and give them a concrete image to work from?

Noooo...no...no...[Laughs.] I wish I had, but no. We sit down, Tak, Kristi and Chris Newman – our soundman – and we swap views and impressions. The thing is, we were all responding to the book and the screenplay. You read that book and you’re going to come away with an impression of what that stuff looks like. None of us were thrilled about having to depict some of the more shocking aspects of the story. It took months during the pre-production process to get over being appalled at the subject matter. By the time it came to film it, I was happily desensitized, to the degree that I could go out and just do it with great gusto and abandon.

Did the demands of making a real down-the-line, narrative-driven film result in a suppression of your tendency to direct the viewer’s attention towards what’s going on at the edges of the story – the incidental details you have a fondness for?

No, all that energy gets channeled into what the new demands are. I was thrilled to have such a strong story, told at such a relentless pace, to focus all that energy on. What was at the forefront was too important to be distracted by the details on the fringes.

It’s the same thing with any kind of comedic aspect, because most of the pictures I do try to have a very active sense of humor about them, whether or not they’re comedy. And I was just delighted to be freed from the discipline of comedy – not to have to think in terms of where are the laughs going to be, and is this funny enough?

 – Gavin Smith, ‘Identity Check: Jonathan Demme Interviewed by Gavin Smith,’ Film Comment 27, no. 1 (1991).

Nicolas Winding Refn: Faith and Violence

Valhalla Rising (Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)

Nicolas Winding Refn was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1970. At the age of 10 he moved to New York with his parents, who both worked in the film industry. After graduating from high school, Refn attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, but found the environment difficult to cope with and was soon expelled. Back in Denmark he was accepted by the Danish Film School but he never took up his place, having decided to drop out prior to the start of the first term. After seeing a short film by Refn on cable TV, a Danish film producer offered him 3.2 million Danish kroner to adapt his short into a feature. At the age of 24, Refn was writing and directing his gritty and uncompromising feature film debut Pusher about a drug dealer in over his head. Pusher became a cult hit and won Refn widespread critical acclaim. 

Refn explored the seedy underbelly of Copenhagen further with Bleeder – a stylized and grim tale exploring the relationship between two friends living on the city’s margins. Bleeder premiered at the 1999 Venice Film Festival and proved a big domestic hit. Fear X, Refn’s third feature and his first in English, is a complex, evocative drama starring John Turturro as a man searching for his wife’s killer. Co-written by renowned novelist Hubert Selby Jr and with a musical score by Brian Eno, Fear X received positive reviews but was a commercial failure. Refn returned to the mean streets of Copenhagen with Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands and Pusher III: I’m the Angel of Death, completing the renowned Pusher trilogy and consolidating his critical status.

Refn was next approached to write and direct Bronson, a violent and surreal film about one of England’s most notorious criminals. Featuring a remarkable performance from Tom Hardy, Bronson combines theatrical tradition and British pop cinema of the 1960s to make a movie about a man who creates his own mythology. After the success of Bronson, Refn co-wrote and directed Valhalla Rising – a bleak and relentless film set in the middle ages about a silent, one-eyed prisoner who escapes from his captors and falls into the company of a group of Christian Vikings preparing to embark on a crusade. Uncertain whether One-Eye is a visitor from heaven or hell, they take him with them on their ship across the sea. 

Returning to Hollywood, Refn next directed the hugely successful Drive in 2011 – a retro genre movie based on a James Sallis novel starring Ryan Gosling as a stunt-car driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. 

While Drive was in preproduction, Nicolas Winding Refn spoke to Adam Stovall of Creative Sceenwriting Weekly about his recently completed Viking odyssey and his approach to screenwriting:

Valhalla Rising (Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)

‘Valhalla Rising’ opens with a man, One-Eye (Mads Mikkelsen), beating another man to a bloody pulp. Then another, and another, and another. Once there is no one else to defeat, he is released and crosses the barren Nordic landscape, accompanied by a boy (Maarten Stevenson). Eventually, they find themselves on a ship with Vikings searching for a new land. More beatings ensue. ‘Valhalla Rising’ is the latest film from director Nicolas Winding Refn, who co-wrote the film with Roy Jacobsen. CS Weekly sat down with Refn to discuss his tale of faith and violence, and how the two are often found in each other’s company.

What was the initial seed of the idea?

When I was five, I was at my parents’ friend’s house and they had a pulp sci-fi novel with a spaceship on the cover. I can’t remember why it was there or what happened, but the obsession with traveling into outer space has been very much a part of what I do. I became interested in making a Viking film that was a film about the discovery of America, because for the Vikings to go out and travel the oceans was the equivalent of us going to the moon.

Can you walk us through how that initial seed became this story?

When you sit down, you come up with all the obvious solutions, and you try them out and see that they don’t ring true, and you get kind of frustrated. It wasn’t until one night, I was having some kind of dream, maybe I was trying to meditate, but the idea of a mutant man who has no past or present and lives on top of a mountain came to me. That was the genesis, because what would happen if that was how the film opened? The idea of the child came about because he needed a companion to travel with. If he had a person his own age, it would be a friendship. If it were a woman, there would be a tension of love and sexuality. A child, however, makes it almost innocent in a way.

The man and child travel the wasteland and encounter a group of Vikings who are off to the Holy Land. Originally, they were pagans who were basically being outlawed by the Christians, who, in the 1100s, were spreading through the North either by violence and war or they would use money to buy influence and sell Jesus to the Vikings. People who didn’t believe were on the run, and America was an interesting concept.

Valhalla Rising (Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)

Originally the film had a more conventional kind of approach, a more conventional kind of story structure. I called Roy Jacobsen, who is a very famous Norwegian novelist, and is also a historian on these matters. I felt like I knew nothing of this history, so it was essential that I find someone who could be part of this journey. Well, two weeks before we were supposed to shoot, I had a complete meltdown and was just lost. I shut down the movie, I said I wouldn’t make it, sorry, bye. Budget had been spent and people were panicking. Roy Jacobsen flew up and sat with me for a few hours in my apartment trying to talk some sense into me, but it wasn’t happening. Until, finally, he said to just make them Christian Vikings. I asked him if there were Christian Vikings, and he said absolutely. They were Vikings, but they were Christians as well. They would travel all around to fight wars. They were warriors and mercenaries in Russia. Suddenly, the whole film became about the future, not about the past. Christianity became an order that was about the future. Everything had always been about the past, and I couldn’t relate to that. I couldn’t get my mind around it. So, that changed everything, and I swapped what the characters wanted to achieve.

The movie is about faith and the rise of mythology. One-Eye goes through four stages. He is born out of mythology. Nobody knows who he is or where he comes from, you only know that he doesn’t belong to anyone for more than four or five years. Then he escapes slavery and becomes a warrior, then he becomes God. Then he becomes Man when he sacrifices himself. And then he’s a ghost, who returns to the mythology he rose from. Then there’s the relationship with the boy, who says he wants to find home – which is very existential because he doesn’t say where. The boy claims that One-Eye speaks through him. It’s like the boy becomes organized religion, because everyone becomes superstitious again, and the boy manipulates everyone else. Also, when the Christians travel for war and they take hallucinogenic drugs to become stronger, that’s true – they would actually do that.

Valhalla Rising (Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)

Your films are known for having these very strong central characters. Do you tend to start scripts with a character in mind or a story?

The way I usually come up with an idea is I come up with what I would like to see. That’s usually based on character. Then I wrap a story around that character. Bronson, for example, there was no story, because Charlie Bronson’s life is not that interesting. Michael Peterson’s life is not that interesting. But the transformation from Michael Peterson to Charlie Bronson was interesting. That came about when I asked myself what this guy would want and realized that he would want to be famous. Then I knew, that’s what this movie is about. That’s usually how I approach everything I do, follow one person’s point of view and a story comes up around it.

What is your habit? Do you have a number of hours you like to work, or is there a page count you’re going for?

I consider writing very painful, and I don’t think I’m very good at it. I wish I was, because I certainly admire it a lot. I write longhand to begin with. If the story is complex, or if I need to be challenged not to repeat myself, I bring in other people – once with Hubert Selby, Jr. and once with Roy Jacobsen. When I sit down to write, though, it’s usually with a pack of index cards and a pen, just writing things down that I would like to see. Eventually that evolves into some kind of story. When it has to be shown to financiers, or people who don’t know me very well, I will sometimes bring a writer in to polish it verbally so it doesn’t just read as ‘Man walks, sees sign, crosses.’ Things you would be sent back to school for. To make it a sellable document, it sometimes needs to be polished up. But it also comes from me being dyslexic. I am very dyslexic and I have trouble reading and writing.

Pusher II (Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)

How important is outlining to you?

Outlining doesn’t become important until I have the core structure. I believe everything is structure. In that way, oddly, art is a complete, organic element – and in that organism a mathematical evolution is apparent.

How particular are you about your workspace and how you work, both alone and when you’re working with someone else?

In that sense, I am completely collaborative. I like to work at night. I can’t go into an office every day, but I admire people who can just sit down and write. I have to go through a process where I try to do everything that can keep me from writing. Dishes, cleaning up, looking through old email, deleting junk mail, anything that takes me away from writing – and once I’ve done everything I can and there’s nothing left, then I start writing because once I start, I cannot stop. I become unbearable to be around, and when you have kids and a wife, that’s difficult because you have to be theirs. So, that means I work at night, sometimes for a couple of hours, sometimes for a long time.

I have many different movies I want to make, so I’ve begun to enjoy the process of making films simultaneously. For example, while [my next film] Drive is in preproduction, I’ve also started preproduction on the film after it, which is called Only God Forgives. That’s a movie I’ve written myself, an original idea. It’s good because having Drive on one side, I can put things in that movie and other things into Only God Forgives, and know I will make both movies. I can sort of steal from both.

Bronson (Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)

Do you listen to music while you write, or do you find that distracting?

I love all kinds of music. The way that I work is, I sometimes come up with a musical approach to the film before there’s an actual story. Each movie I’ve made so far has a musicality to it. Pusher 1, my first film, is The Ramones. Bleeder, my second film, was definitely glam rock. Fear X was basically Brian Eno, who became the third person I ever hired on the movie. He would send me sounds and music ideas as me and Mr. Selby worked on the script. Pusher 2 is Iron Maiden. Pusher 3 is Neil Diamond. Bronson is opera. Valhalla Rising is Einstürzende Neubauten. Drive is Depeche Mode. I definitely prefer to listen to music while I write, it’s certainly the closest thing to cocaine I can get while I write.

– Adam Stovall: ‘He Came From Myth: Valhalla Rising’s Nicolas Winding Refn’. Courtesy of Creative Screenwriting Weekly.